Cutting Edge

34

DeBolt was pushed and shoved into the backseat of a car. Two doors closed, and the car shot forward like a racehorse out of a gate.

Still cuffed and hooded, DeBolt was thrown left, then right, before the car’s accelerations dampened and fell in with the hum of steady traffic. Realizing he was finally outside the confines of the SCIF, he tried for a connection. His first request was simple: Own location.

The answer arrived instantly, a crisp map in vivid color. His blue dot was at the edge of something called the Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. Federal Building in central Boston. DeBolt was barely a mile from Logan International Airport, where he and Lund had been captured — the only word that fit. He searched for information on the building, and learned that among its tenants were the Department of Homeland Security, which encompassed Customs and Border Protection, and also the departments of State and Justice. The Secret Service was there as well, as was an administrative outpost of the Peace Corps. Even discarding the latter, it made for a long list of suspects who could be responsible for his abduction.

More ominous was the fact that he was leaving. The man who’d begun interviewing him — whom DeBolt had last seen on the floor of the Calais Lodge, and whose arm he’d nearly broken — had been interrupted by an important phone call. Had something in that call altered the situation? He didn’t like the trajectory of things. For a few hours a semblance of order and reason had taken hold. Now he was suddenly being hauled off to the notorious “undisclosed location.” He sensed someone in the seat to his left, and decided engagement was worth a try.

“Where is Shannon?” he asked. They already knew her name.

No reply. DeBolt used his knees and arms to explore. To his right was a door, and he could feel the buttons for the window and a recessed handle. There was no way to tell if the door was locked. Didn’t police cars have doors that could only be opened from the outside? It was yet another question he’d never before asked.

He decided to try again.

“I want to speak to an attorney. I have a right to—”

The blow struck DeBolt in the rib cage, an elbow probably, compact and heavier than it needed to be. It completely winded him, a nonverbal message that couldn’t have been clearer. DeBolt said nothing more.

He did not, however, give up on communication. There was a chance he was being transferred to a different federal facility, which meant he might end up in another SCIF where he wouldn’t have a signal. Sensing the car bogging down in traffic, DeBolt put META into high gear.

The first thing he did was call up the voiceprint of his interrogator, already recorded and saved — somehow — but never sent. DeBolt launched it into cyberspace. The reply took nearly five minutes, but was worth the wait. He received the identity of his interrogator with: “99.8 % certainty.” Under present circumstances, good enough for DeBolt.

That name led to more requests, and soon the information floodgates opened. He approached his research from every conceivable angle. Some of the answers came right away, others more slowly. A handful never came at all. Certain information altered his course, new vectors taken and gaps filled in. His thoughts fell to a rush. Data in and queries out. He logged certain details as important, discarded others as irrelevant. With the greatest possible speed, DeBolt amassed a trove of information on the men who had been hunting him.

The results were nothing short of spectacular.

The colonel was happy. The transfer of their captives from the federal building to the safe house had gone smoothly.

Moving prisoners was never an easy thing. It combined the logistics of travel, always awkward, with any number of complications. Prisoners rightfully saw it as their best chance for an escape. Cars could break down and police could get involved. The last time the colonel had transferred a captive was three months ago: he and a Mossad assassin had hauled a much sought militant out of Yemen’s Empty Quarter, the man bound by his own bootlaces and strapped to the back of a donkey — or more precisely, he’d later been told, a Nubian wild ass. A bar story and a punch line all in one. That they’d succeeded was nothing less than an act of divine providence. This time the commander of Unit 9 had everything in his favor. Two borrowed federal vehicles — solid and serviced, and staffed by his own team of operators — to move a pair of well-shackled prisoners to a suburb of West Boston. No ass involved.

During the journey to the safe house, he’d ordered that Lund and their mystery man were to have no contact whatsoever. Not yet anyway. They arrived in separate cars, and were taken to rooms on opposite sides of the house, one in the basement and the other on the second floor. The place was a two-story colonial, an FBI retreat established six months ago but rarely used since, situated in an agreeable neighborhood west of town. If the community had a theme it was acreage, the homes spaced widely apart. Mature trees and hedgerows gave further privacy to residents who clearly craved it — and none more so than the temporary occupants of 3443 Saddle Lane.

Once their charges were secured behind locked doors, the colonel assembled his team and went over the plan. “I’ve heard nothing new about what happened to the general, but honestly, I don’t expect to. It’s time to put this op to bed. We’ll dump the girl soon, but first I want to interrogate our man, and I need her as leverage — he seems to care about her safety.”

“Time frame?” the major asked.

“We unload the girl tonight. Then we’ll egress clean first thing in the morning.”

“And the Coastie?”

The commander hesitated. “That depends on what I find out about him.”

A watch schedule was posted, and two men were allowed to rack out in what was done up as a kid’s bedroom — there were Star Wars posters on the walls, and the bunk beds were dressed in sheets printed with fire engines. The colonel went to the room where their man was locked up — it had been hardened by the FBI for just that purpose. He went inside without knocking, but before he could say anything, their captive greeted him with, “It’s about time, Colonel Freeman.”